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Wednesday, May 30, 2018

I went to Maine for the first time last year. It was beautiful and rugged and remote feeling. And it could definitely be the perfect place to escape to when you need to reexamine your life and change direction or if you are hiding from a hurt. Perhaps that's exactly why Shelley Noble chose to set her latest novel, Lighthouse Beach, in a small ocean side town in Maine. Her characters certainly have a lot to figure out in this summer beach read.

Lillo Gray inexplicably agrees to attend an old friend's high society wedding in Kennebunkport. She hasn't seen or spoken to Jess in many years and she doesn't quite know why she's been invited. But when Jess needs to run away from her awful, cheating fiance and her nasty, controlling parents, it's a good thing Lillo is there. She, Jess, and Jess' college friends, Diana and Allie, flee the debacle in the battered van Lillo drove there and head back to Lillo's small cottage at Lighthouse Beach. None of them bargained on spending a week together, hiding out from Jess' unpleasant parents and starting the slow process of facing the issues that each carries with her as baggage. Initially the women think that they are there to help Jess but in fact, they are all on a journey to self-discovery and to breaking free of the things that hold each of them back. As they examine the painful parts of their lives, they slowly start weaving into the life of this struggling small town and of the people who live or serve there, becoming a part of the community.

The characters do not all get equal time with Lillo and Jess being the main focus of the story. In particular, Allie's problems seem to be less detailed and the healing she does in Lighthouse Beach is far less touched on than the other women's, being more of an aside than anything else. Jess' long time inability to stand up to her parents is remarked on repeatedly so that her backbone, when she discovers it, feels a little bit unearned. After all, she was willing to let her parents steamroll her into a marriage she didn't want and to direct her entire life just one week prior and had dithered about allowing herself to be sucked back into their orbit even less time ago than that. Lillo's story remains a mystery for quite a long time although there are multiple cryptic hints along the way as to why she abandoned her promising medical career, the thing she once wanted most in the world. She spends much of the story self-flagellating over this mysterious incident. Mainers do have a reputation for being taciturn or closed-mouthed but knowing her story earlier might have made her a more sympathetic character, especially initially, to the reader. And there were places where it seemed some backstory or plot thread was missing from the novel. For instance: why on earth would Diana lie to Jess about where her former fiance might have gotten Diana's cell number? Was this originally meant to be a piece of the story that got cut? It never turned into a plot thread, despite priming the reader for something significant. Most of the novel was unsurprising but sometimes it's okay (and even desirable) to submerse yourself in the predictable and familiar. Despite my criticisms, I did enjoy the book as an easy read about female friendships and the support the characters (female and male alike) gave each other as they faced fears and found the courage to stand up for their needs and wants. The ending of the novel was fairly open-ended, just as in life, leaving the possibility of someday revisiting these characters again. Readers looking for an easy and satisfying read to tuck into their beach bag would do well to consider this one.

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

Amazon says this about the book: One woman is about to discover everything she believes—knows—to be true about her life…isn’t.

After hitting her head, Lucy Sparks awakens in the hospital to a shocking revelation: the man she’s known and loved for years—the man she recently married—is not actually her husband. In fact, they haven’t even spoken since their breakup four years earlier. The happily-ever-after she remembers in vivid detail—right down to the dress she wore to their wedding—is only one example of what her doctors call a false memory: recollections Lucy’s mind made up to fill in the blanks from the coma.

Her psychologist explains the condition as honest lying, because while Lucy’s memories are false, they still feel incredibly real. Now she has no idea which memories she can trust—a devastating experience not only for Lucy, but also for her family, friends and especially her devoted boyfriend, Matt, whom Lucy remembers merely as a work colleague.

When the life Lucy believes she had slams against the reality she’s been living for the past four years, she must make a difficult choice about which life she wants to lead, and who she really is.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Do you know Robert Burns' "the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry?" If not, I'm sure you're familiar with the concept. No matter how well you plan something, no matter how many contingencies you plan for, no matter how solid everything seems, there's just no guarantee that fate will allow the plan to happen. And sometimes that's for the best, even if it doesn't seem like it at the moment. This is very true for main character Marnie MacGraw in Maddie Dawson's newest novel, Matchmaking for Beginners.

Marnie is on the verge of marrying the man she loves and settling down into the happy, ordinary domesticity she's always wanted when she meets her fiance Noah's kindly and eccentric Great Aunt Blix. Blix, who the family thinks is batty (and not in a good way), tells Marnie that she's going to live a big, big life. Although this isn't what Marnie wants, she and Blix hit it off, realizing that they share some very special matchmaking and magic skills, both in tune with the people and environment around them. When Marnie and Noah's marriage has a rough start and then completely falls apart after less than two weeks, Marnie is completely devastated, returning home to Florida to heal and recover, and quickly ending up in a serious relationship, more or less by default, with an old friend who promises to want the same tame and conventional life that she does, the life she thought she would build with Noah. And it seems that Marnie will get her wish of a predictable and expected life until Blix, who has been ill for a long time, dies and leaves Marnie her quirky, slightly shabby Brooklyn brownstone and the assorted tenants and friends who live in it with the stipulation Marnie has to live in the house for three months in order to inherit. Surprising everyone, not least herself, Marnie agrees to the terms and moves in.

As Marnie lives in Blix's house, she starts to question what she really wants, to get involved in the lives of Blix's beloved but emotionally damaged tenants, and to build a life in Brooklyn, starting to muster the courage to reject convention and find the life she's supposed to live. Marnie evolves from being uncertain, making poor choices the reader can see from a mile away, and allowing others to dictate her life and suppress her natural joie de vivre to embracing all the painful and wonderful chaos that is life, and learning, as Blix told her, that love is in fact the most important thing of all. The small touches of magic, like Marnie and Blix seeing sparkles around things and people, are both magic sounding and synesthesia-like and add an extra bit of charm to the story. The matchmaking, referenced in the title, actually plays a much smaller role than might be expected. The secondary characters mainly orbit around Blix and later Marnie although it would have been satisfying to have had more to their stories than there is. Blix was a lovely character and her personal mantra, "whatever happens, love that," sums up not only the way she lived her own life and advised Marnie to live hers but also the way that we readers should live ours as well. The novel is sweet and delightful and reminds us that we can control the color of the light that surrounds us. We can choose goodness and love no matter what. Readers looking for an ultimately affirming, positive book will be thoroughly gratified by the time they spend in the pages of this novel.

Monday, May 28, 2018

As predicted, this week was no better than last week on the reading/reviewing front. In fact, it may have even been worse! The end of the school year always has me scrambling and busy and it seems this year is no exception. This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist
Matchmaking for Beginners by Maddie Dawson

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love by Per J. Andersson
The New York Time Footsteps by various authors
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
Mean by Myriam Gurba
The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison
The Wangs Vs. the World by Jade Chang
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
One House Over by Mary Monroe
The Taster by V.S. Alexander
Postcards from the Canyon by Lisa Gitlin
Burntown by Jennifer McMahon
Everything She Didn't Say by Jane Kirkpatrick
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale
The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman
The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld
Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Reviews posted this week:

nothing... ::big sigh::

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Unslut by Emily Lindin
This Far Isn't Far Enough by Lynn Sloan
The Hounds of Spring by Lucy Andrews Cummin
Paper Boats by Dee Lestari
Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies
A Handful of Happiness by Massimo Vacchetta and Antonella Tomaselli
Swimming with Elephants by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann
As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman
Dates from Hell and Other Places by Elyse Russo
Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman
Love Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
A Song for the River by Philip Connors
Daditude by Chris Erskine
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills by Jennifer Haupt
Beautiful Music by Michael Zadoorian
Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui
Vanishing Twins by Lea Dieterich
Tenemental by Vikki Warner
Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson
The Lido by Libby Page
The Invisible Valley by Su Wei
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs
The Showrunner by Kim Mortishugu
I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice
Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan
Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman
Christmas in July by Alan Michael Parker
Nothing Forgotten by Jessica Levine
Housegirl by Michael Donkor
Wildwood by Elinor Florence
All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
Weedeater by Robert Gipe
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
Come Back to the Swamp by Laura Morrison
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Sound by Bella Bathurst
Celine by Peter Heller
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist
Matchmaking for Beginners by Maddie Dawson

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

Amazon says this about the book: As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made.

There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride.

What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best?

A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children -- each in their own way -- tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home.

A Place for Us is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. It announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.

A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love by Per J. Andersson
The New York Time Footsteps by various authors
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
Mean by Myriam Gurba
The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison
The Wangs Vs. the World by Jade Chang
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
One House Over by Mary Monroe
The Taster by V.S. Alexander
Postcards from the Canyon by Lisa Gitlin
Burntown by Jennifer McMahon
Everything She Didn't Say by Jane Kirkpatrick
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist
The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Unslut by Emily Lindin
This Far Isn't Far Enough by Lynn Sloan
The Hounds of Spring by Lucy Andrews Cummin
Paper Boats by Dee Lestari
Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies
A Handful of Happiness by Massimo Vacchetta and Antonella Tomaselli
Swimming with Elephants by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann
As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman
Dates from Hell and Other Places by Elyse Russo
Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman
Love Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
A Song for the River by Philip Connors
Daditude by Chris Erskine
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills by Jennifer Haupt
Beautiful Music by Michael Zadoorian
Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui
Vanishing Twins by Lea Dieterich
Tenemental by Vikki Warner
Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson
The Lido by Libby Page
The Invisible Valley by Su Wei
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs
The Showrunner by Kim Mortishugu
I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice
Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan
Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman
Christmas in July by Alan Michael Parker
Nothing Forgotten by Jessica Levine
Housegirl by Michael Donkor
Wildwood by Elinor Florence
All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
Weedeater by Robert Gipe
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
Come Back to the Swamp by Laura Morrison
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Sound by Bella Bathurst
Celine by Peter Heller

A gut wrenching novel about a man whose partner is diagnosed with an aggressive and terrible illness while pregnant with their child and how he must handle the terror and bureaucracy both of the hospital and the government after their daughter's premature birth.

A novel based on true and horrifying history where a young girl gives up her baby for adoption but the child is raised in a psychiatric hospital because they get more money than orphanages. It sounds heartbreaking and crazy (no pun intended).

Friday, May 18, 2018

When I was small, I dreamed up whole worlds, frequently retreating to my bedroom to talk to myself and the characters I created, advancing their stories or changing them to suit my mood. It's been a long time since I did that and I certainly never did it with any kind of thoroughness or maturity. Author Beatriz Williams is still creating worlds and revisiting them but she isn't doing it in the privacy of her room; she's sharing these people and their world with all of us in her novels. Many of her books are interconnected although they aren't properly sequels to each other. Her characters do range in and out of books about each other so reading more than one will give you insider information that enriches the reading experience though. Her latest novel, Cocoa Beach, is definitely a companion novel to A Certain Age and has strong connections to Wicked City as well.

Virginia Fortescue Fitzwilliam leaves New York with her two year old daughter Evelyn after the very public trial and conviction of her father for her mother's long ago murder. As if the one tragedy wasn't enough for this young woman to endure, she must go down to Cocoa Beach, Florida in order to look into and wrap up her estranged late husband's estate. Her husband Simon has perished in a house fire leaving behind a thriving business, a shipping company, an orange plantation, and a hotel. When she gets to Florida though, things are not as straightforward as might be expected and Virginia finds herself uncertain who she can trust.

The novel flips back and forth between 1917 and 1922. In the former, Virginia tells the story of her meeting and romance with Simon in France in the midst of WWI. She's an intrepid American ambulance driver while he's a handsome Cornish surgeon with a complicated background. In the latter story line, Virginia is in Florida with Simon's twin brother Samuel and his sister Clara and perhaps getting too close to dangerous things that she clearly doesn't understand. Her feelings about her husband's character have undergone a complete turnaround from 1917 and 1922 and the reasons why are liberally teased throughout the length of the novel. But she cannot completely let his memory go, not least because their daughter Eleanor is the love of her life. In fact, she feels betrayed by both her father and her husband, something that makes her question her own judgment. After some of the 1922 chapters are letters written from Simon to Virginia during their almost three year estrangement, giving the reader information about his perspective on their marriage and his character that Virginia, not having read the letters, doesn't have.

The lush surroundings of a Florida just starting to be developed cease to be a tropical escape, instead feeling increasingly oppressive and scary as the tension rises throughout the novel. In the end the book almost becomes a thriller, starting to gallop along at such a pace. There are bootleggers, a shadowy revenue agent, toxic family secrets, illegitimate children, murder, a villain pulling strings, romance, life threatening danger, the question of who wanted Simon dead, and manipulations galore in this soap opera of a historical novel. Virginia is suspicious and occasionally strong and decisive but her defining characteristic is the love she has for her beloved daughter. Protecting Eleanor and being there for her always so that her baby doesn't know the pain of growing up without a mother, as she did, is the driving force in her life and it will be the thing that prompts her to not just survive but to find the strength to overcome as she uncovers all the answers she seeks. The final revelation of truth comes rather late in the story and the ending is ultimately left wide open for another book set in this same fictional Prohibition world. In fact, the end of the novel is where it might be more than a little handy to have read Williams' other books mentioned above. Williams does a good job of keeping the reader guessing about Simon's character, giving a tiny bit of proof that he is not all he seems when Virginia is head over heels with him but then countering that doubt just enough to make the reader question Virginia's change of heart. Was she right about him in 1917 or is she right about him in 1922? I liked the other books in this (loose) series a bit better but this was still well researched, pulse pounding historical fiction.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

The book is being released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 22, 2018.

Amazon says this about the book: Award-winning author Caryl Phillips presents a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only sixteen years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936, a forty-five-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later, she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips’s gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized.

A true literary feat, A View of the Empire at Sunset uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Husband and wife writing team Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist's charming new novel Two Steps Forward was obviously meant for me right now. I had previously read and loved The Rosie Project so the writing was likely to appeal to me. I have been noticing an uptick in the amount of uplifting literature or "up lit" published recently and have been interested not only in the phenomenon but also in these faith-in-humanity restoring stories and what they give to us as readers. And finally I do have a fascination with books about hiking and pilgrimages and the Camino de Santiago in particular pulls at me. With all of that going for it, it's no surprise that I enjoyed this gentle novel.

People undertake pilgrimages for every reason under the sun. Zoe, an American, is a recent widow struggling to process the sudden change in her life, her unexpected lack of money, and her re-awakened interest in the art she gave up in order to have children (now grown) and be a wife. She's arrived in Cluny to visit an old college friend as she contemplates what to do with her life now. Martin, a Brit, is an engineer who fled to Cluny, France to teach for a year after his wife's affair with his boss left him both unemployed and divorced. Completely broke, Martin sees a pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago struggling with the trolley he's using to transport his belongings and decides first to see if he can design a better option, and once he does, to try and market it to earn some money. Neither Zoe nor Martin intended to hike the Camino de Santiago (also known as the Chemin or the Way), but it offers each of them a chance to change themselves, their perspectives, and their lives. Zoe will walk it in order to have time to think and to plan her next steps in life, to reflect on her marriage and who she became versus who she wants to be. Martin will walk it to road test his one-wheeled cart as proof to investors that it is everything he claims. But both of them will gain so much more from their walk than just what their original intentions promise.

Starting out within days of each other on their respective walks after having met briefly in Cluny, Zoe and Martin have set (negative) initial ideas about each other and even though they continue to run across each other as they look for places for food and to spend the night, they keep their distance. They each meet a wide variety of fellow travelers as they walk, all of whom have their own reasons for tackling the long and winding way. It is through these fellow pilgrims that Zoe and Martin start to thaw towards each other, coming to value the others' presence on the trail even though long stretches of their time is still spent walking alone. Alternating first person chapters between Zoe and Martin, the reader sees not only their internal motivations for walking but also what they think of each other and of the others they meet along the way. The first person narration also allows the reader to see when and how they each start to confront the things in their life that have brought them to this place and this walk as they learn that no matter how far they go, they cannot out walk the things that burden them and instead must acknowledge them, face them, and either release them or embrace them in order to move forward. Sometimes this knowledge comes as their relationship deepens but at other times it must be learned in solo contemplation.

The novel takes some time to really get going, focused as it is on the walk itself. In the beginning the characters are quite consumed by the purely physical concerns of the journey, finding food and inexpensive shelter, caring for their feet and tired, dirty bodies. It is only later in their respective travels that they start to focus on the emotional aspects of this pilgrimage to find themselves. The pacing is slow and only ever speeds up to leisurely as the novel progresses so readers looking for a romp of any sort are forewarned. Instead of a rollicking adventure, this is a sweet story of starting over, embracing change--good and bad, the goodness of humanity, and second (or third) chances at love. It is a quick and easy read and it is clear to see that Simsion and Buist, who have themselves walked the route that Zoe and Martin take, not only have a knowledge of the Camino but also a strong affection for it and for the changes it made in their own lives. Sweet, sometimes funny, sometimes romantic, and definitely thoughtful, this is a delightful and engaging read.

The book is being released by Knopf Books for Young Readers on May 15, 2018.

Amazon says this about the book: The finale you've all been waiting for: The Penderwicks at Last is the final, flawless installment in the modern classic series from National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jeanne Birdsall!

Nine years, five older siblings, a few beloved dogs, and an endless array of adventures--these are the things that have shaped Lydia's journey since readers first met her in The Penderwicks in Spring.

Now it's summertime, and eleven-year-old Lydia is dancing at the bus stop, waiting for big sister Batty to get home from college.

This is a very important dance and a very important wait because the two youngest sisters are about to arrive home to find out that the Penderwicks will all be returning to Arundel this summer, the place where it all began. And better still is the occasion: a good old-fashioned, homemade-by-Penderwicks wedding.

Bursting with heart and brimming with charm, this is a joyful, hilarious ode to the family we love best. And oh my MOPS--Meeting of Penderwick Siblings--does Jeanne Birdsall's The Penderwicks at Last crescendo to one perfect Penderwick finale.

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

If you had told me that I would read a Western, chock full of violence and killing, for my book club and would thoroughly enjoy it, I would wonder if you knew me at all. And yet that is exactly what happened with this Booker Prize short-listed book. I really did not want to read it but because book club should be about pushing your personal reading boundaries, I decided to give it a try. Now I'm sure I'll read whatever deWitt come up with next because his The Sisters Brothers was such an oddly pleasing novel to read.

Charlie and Eli Sisters are contract killers living in Oregon. Hired by the Commodore to track Hermann Kermit Warm and kill him for stealing something from the Commodore, the two brothers, whose names strike fear in any who hear it, strike out towards Sacramento and the last place Warm was seen. They don't care what he's stolen or really anything at all about him other than that they get to kill him. Along their long journey, they meet (and often kill) a whole host of other characters, some who deserve it (evil) and some who don't (unlucky bumblers). And it is through their interactions with others, and their decision of what to do with Warm when they finally catch up with him, that show the reader who they are at their cores. Eli is quiet and naive with some semblance of a conscience while Charlie is more a straight up cold-blooded killer greedy for what he thinks he deserves.

Narrated by the childlike Eli, the reader is given access to his inner humanity instead of just his outside appearance and reputation. Considered simple by his more psychopathic brother, he details their encounters with others and his growing realization not only that they might be doing wrong but that his brother is using Eli's easily sparked rage for his own purposes. Although they are a team, Eli acts as much out of filial duty to Charlie as anything and the brothers' differences are legion as the book progresses. Eli loves food and wants to settle down with any woman who will have him, respectable or prostitute while Charlie loves nothing so much as whiskey and killing. One brother is a rather lovable (or perhaps pitiable) doofus while the other is more hardened and ruthless although both are unquestionably killers.

The story is undeniably violent but is wonderful despite that. DeWitt has a light hand throughout, leavening the darkness with humor and funny little details. His Eli is constantly dieting and is delighted by the minty taste of the tooth powder he discovers in the course of the brothers' adventures, not exactly your stereotypical gunslinger. His feelings and actions toward his plodding horse are misguided and gruesome but somehow also touching. The structure of the novel is mostly straightforward but there are two intermission pieces that are a bit confusing, completely different in tone from the rest of the story, and seem to contribute little to nothing to the story. Readers will find themselves feeling surprisingly sympathetic with characters who should by all rights be unlikable and although the ending is a bit quick, this was a fun and entertaining reading experience. If you like adventure stories with killing, or even if, like me,you don't, this is one to pick up and enjoy.

Monday, May 7, 2018

Nothing Forgotten by Jessica Levine
Housegirl by Michael Donkor
Wildwood by Elinor Florence
All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
Weedeater by Robert Gipe
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
Come Back to the Swamp by Laura Morrison
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini
Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist
Melmoth by Sarah Perry

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love by Per J. Andersson
The New York Time Footsteps by various authors
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
Mean by Myriam Gurba
The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison
The Wangs Vs. the World by Jade Chang
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan(br />
Sound by Bella Bathurst

Reviews posted this week:

nothing

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Unslut by Emily Lindin
This Far Isn't Far Enough by Lynn Sloan
The Hounds of Spring by Lucy Andrews Cummin
Paper Boats by Dee Lestari
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies
A Handful of Happiness by Massimo Vacchetta and Antonella Tomaselli
Swimming with Elephants by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann
As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman
Dates from Hell and Other Places by Elyse Russo
Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard
The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman
Love Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
A Song for the River by Philip Connors
Daditude by Chris Erskine
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills by Jennifer Haupt
Beautiful Music by Michael Zadoorian
Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui
Vanishing Twins by Lea Dieterich
Tenemental by Vikki Warner
Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson
The Lido by Libby Page
The Invisible Valley by Su Wei
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs
The Showrunner by Kim Mortishugu
I Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice
Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan
Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman
Christmas in July by Alan Michael Parker
Nothing Forgotten by Jessica Levine
Housegirl by Michael Donkor
Wildwood by Elinor Florence
All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
Weedeater by Robert Gipe
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
Come Back to the Swamp by Laura Morrison
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini
Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist
Melmoth by Sarah Perry

Since I'm intrigued by DNA and the ways in which we can uncover so much these days (although there's still so much we don't know), this story of a woman who uses her own DNA to look at the European family all the way back to the Neolithic will feed my interest for sure.

This collection of auto-biographical essays addressing Gopo's varied and various experiences as an immigrant, a black woman, a wife, and more was recommended to me by a mutual friend and I am very interested to delve into experiences both far and near to my own.

McDermott is amazing and although I know that this one touches on a subject I'll find hard (the suicide of a young Irish immigrant and the way it reverberates through the generations), I expect to be blown away

For when I need a guaranteed laugh, this one about a guy who gets a job at a magazine, meets and sleeps with a woman who turns out to be the sex columnist there, setting off dueling columns about their sexual escapades should be aces.

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About Me

A voracious reader, fledgling runner, and full time kiddie chauffeur.
If anyone out there wants to send me books for review (oh please don't fro me in that briar patch!), you can contact me at whitreidsmama (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you do write me there, put the blog name in the subject line or I'm liable to send the unread message to spam. My book review policy can be found here.